The Mephisto Club

Having followed Jane Rizzoli from the beginning of the series, has been
a bit like watching a beloved child mature into an even more beloved adult, as she finds confidence, learns to be a bit less abrasive,

She falls in love with the right guy, and has a baby. Her professional relationship and blossoming personal ties with Maura Isles have also been a delight to witness. Maura herself becomes more intriguing with each new book, and the fact that she has a mother who is the female equivalent of Hannibal Lecter before Thomas Harris lost control of him, is just the icing on the cake. The Mephisto Club is one of the most deliciously creepy books I have read in a long time. I actually found myself shivering a couple of times. The supporting show more cast of characters is beautifully drawn, from the members of the club to Jane's amazingly dysfunctional family to Maura's forbidden lover.

One of the things at which Tess.Gerritsen has become more adept with each new novel in the series is her ability to inject levity--albeit gallows humor--into the mix, without losing sight of the seriousness of the subject matter. I am greatly looking forward to more Jane and Maura. show less

At first I had high hopes for this novel. The first chapter was very straightforward in style, the prose very clear and unremarkable. There was a hook and some very promising suspense building up. I literally felt emotions boil along my veins when an early villain was revealed – I really hated that O’Donnell character.

The problem was I began to hate Jane, too. Then Maura. For different reasons. Jane is the most ignorant and judgmental cop I’ve ever read about. The most basic ideas about symbolism and religion are presented to her over the course of the investigation and she dismisses them out of hand and mocks them outright. She’s so intimidated by those she perceives as more educated or intellectual than her, that she can only show more lash out and dismisses them without understanding.

Maura wasn’t an asshole as such, but she wasn’t an attractive character either. She’s neurotic and only thinks in clichés. Like a child, she wants everything to go her way. She envies Jane who can simply call and speak to her husband openly, while she has to call Daniel on the sly and wonders who will be listening. After one frigging night of screwing? Pathetic.

And the whole side plot about Jane’s parents breaking up served to illustrate another negative part of Jane’s personality – that she still doesn’t view her parents as anything but parents. She’s so immature that she cannot accept them as adults exhibiting adult behavior – so dad cheats and mom flirts – stop acting like you’re 10. Gah!

The plot element of young person on the run from some evil guy/thing is so played. Lily hides in towns all over Europe trying to keep away from her cousin who apparently killed her entire family and is now killing her old friends from high school. She has to scrounge for money and eventually prostitutes herself. Yawn.

The whole religious/satanic/ritualistic aspect of the killings is overplayed as well. The secret society formed to catch bad guys is presented as sinister in and of itself, but then turns out not to be and actually becomes victimized, too. show less

Pleasant surprise. Patricia Cornwell, darn her, continues her spiral into mediocrity & self-plagiarism with the recent release of her latest, The Front, on the disappointing heels of her last four or five Scarpettas going back to the turn of the century, so I desperately needed another CSI crime thriller option, another writer/former doctor/medical examiner/coroner/detective type to infuse some freshness & excitement into the genre since I needed a break from the tedium of reading Gravity's Rainbow start to almost finish, and wouldn't'cha know it, Tess Gerritsen, bless her heart, was there to see me through.

The Mephisto Club, sixth in the Jane Rizzoli detective series (though my virgin Rizzoli read) incorporates several favorite show more interests of mine: mysterious, though not-at-all-like-Da-Vinci-Code, secret societies, apocryphal literature (i.e., The Book of Enoch & The Book of Jubilees), symbiology and, dare I admit it (please don't strike me down dead Lord, please!) demon, uh, demonology. Now, I'm no aspiring warlock or wiccan, and The Mephisto Club would probably bore a fun loving Aleister Crowley type occultist (might as well try interesting a Navy Seal in an exciting game of Battleship), but for a Luciferian lightweight like me possessing merely an unhealthy interest in stories satanic, The Mephisto Club, with its ritualistic skin carvings & dismemberments, demon & Devil hunting, priestly affairs, & crowded cobblestone chases through the dark & dank back alleys of Rome, beautifully fits the fun, page-turning, Beelzebub bill. show less

Satanism, or symbols there of, connect Boston with a small town in upstate New York while a young woman is on the run in Italy. In the background, there is the Mephisto Club, the last of an ancient line of so-called demon hunters. While Anthony Sansone gives us all the creeps, it's nice to once again see Daniel Murphy. A typical R&I case set against the backdrop of Satanism, which was an interesting historical lens. I could have done without Jane's parents' drama as it didn't add anything & felt random.

I'm reading this at the same time that "Better Call Saul" is a thing on TV, which just makes me laugh.

While this story of ancient evil recurring again to kill is interesting it doesn't really fit in my mental picture of the series starring Maura Isles and Jane Rizzoli. It's almost as if Ms Gerritsen had a story to tell and hung it on this series.

The story is of a series of strange murders, seemingly focused on a small but strange group of people, the Mephisto club, a group who have a lot of power and influence. Their theories about the murders don't fit well with Jane's worldview and other issues flare in both Jane and Maura's worlds.

It's not a bad read but somehow it felt like a story Ms Gerritsen wanted to tell and used this series as a prop, but it's a prop that doesn't quite flow as well as it might.

I think I should start out by mentioning that anything about demons or the Devil just scares the hell out of me. I'm not a particularly religious person, but was just traumatized by my viewing of The Exorcist when I was about twelve years old. So, yeah, I'm a wimp when it comes to that sort of stuff. However, I am inexplicably drawn towards the subject probably because I like to be scared sometimes (when it's daytime, of course). So, The Mephisto Club was right up my alley with Rizzoli and Isles being one of my favorite mystery series and with it being about demons/the Devil.

While I didn't really love Vanish (the book previous to this one) because I didn't find it as page-turning as Tess Gerritsen's other novels, I absolutely did not show more have that problem with The Mephisto Club. I finished it in a day and a half and that's only because I had to study for finals. Had I not had to do that, I would've finished quicker. This novel starts off with a bang and just does not let up. One of the main things that I loved about it was that it was not a typical mystery. It wasn't all about the whodunit. But it also weaved in things about mythology and Nephilism. Some of the things mentioned I have heard about, but most I didn't so I find it much more interesting than her other Rizzoli and Isles series.

When it comes to the main characters' plots in the book, I wasn't as interested in them as I was about the whole Nephilism thing. However, one thing about their plots that I did like was that Jane and Maura seemed much more like friends in this novel than in the previous ones. The subsequent tension that they exhibited due to one of Maura's choices was welcome. I was thinking "Finally they're acting like friends" because let's face it, friends fight. And speaking of Maura's B plot, it didn't annoy me the way something like that would usually annoy me in a novel. Maybe it's because I've gotten to know Maura throughout the other novels and I know how out of character it was for her. Had it been something that was introduced when the readers first met Maura, than it would've definitely colored my judgment towards her as a main character.

Anyway, The Mephisto Club was a great novel. It was an incredible page-turner, interesting, and creepy as hell. That's what I want in all my mysteries. Sure, the ending wasn't as bang-worthy as the beginning, but I didn't really have any problems with it. If anything it made me that much more anxious to pick up the next book in the series. This one is highly recommended. And since I've gushed about the fact that TNT is making this a series in my other reviews of the novels, I won't really mention it here (beyond this sentence I mean). show less

Tightly written and the action moves along at a good pace. Some of the side stories involving forbidden love and marital discord seem superfluous but Gerritsen does give us an interesting twist on the psycho killer theme when she introduces a whiff of the supernatural.